study and examination, but will yield new beauty and new pleasure as it
is better understood. For instance, take the first stanza above. Lowell
says Longfellow's poetry is sweet and easily understood and that one
line follows another smoothly. To make us see how smoothly, he makes a
beautiful comparison, draws for us an exquisite picture. As smooth, he
says, as is our own river Charles when at night, fearing to disturb by
so much as a single ripple the reflection of the crescent moon, a
mirrored skiff, it glides along noiselessly but whispering gently to
the reeds that line its shores.
Again, Lowell says that the very winds love Longfellow, and waft his
name about the world, giving him fame and honor; but his friends know
him to be a man with a loving heart, and so they steal up to him and
murmur through the noisy shoutings of the crowd a simple _God bless
you!_ which they know Longfellow will appreciate on his birthday
more than all his fame.
To understand the first line in the third stanza, we must know of the
three Fates who in the old Greek myth controlled the life of every man.
One spun the thread of life, a second determined its course, and the
third stood by with shears ready to cut the thread where death was due.
Lowell says if being a skillful poet will make a man immortal, if
our life can be lengthened by a song, then Longfellow shall not leave
us even though his body goes, and in another generation his fame shall
be doubly great.
THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH
_By_ HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp and black and long;
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,--
He earns whate'er he can;
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night.
You can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,
With measured beat and slow,
Like sexton ringing the village bell
When the evening sun is low.
And children, coming home from school,
Look in at the open door;
They love to see the naming forge,
And hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly
Like chaff from a threshing-floor.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE BLACKSMITH]
He goes on Sunday to the church,
And sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach,
He hears his daughter's voice,
Singing in the village choir,
And it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother's voice,
Singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more,
How in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes
A tear out of his eyes.
Toiling--rejoicing--sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
Has earned a night's repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,
For the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life
Our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped
Each burning deed and thought!
What a clear little poem this is! From beginning to end there is
scarcely a thing that needs to be explained. We can see the two
pictures almost as though they had been painted for us in colors. If
anything is obscure, it is the comparison of the sparks to the chaff
from a threshing-floor. And if that isn't clear to us it is because
times have changed, and we no longer see grain threshed out on a floor.
His "limpid verse to limpid verse succeeds, smooth as our Charles!"
Longfellow uses skill in the song. He shows us the old blacksmith at
his forge and draws us with the other children to see his work. We
learn to love the strong old man, independent, proud and happy. We
sympathize with him as he weeps and admire him so much that we delight
at the lesson Longfellow so skillfully places at the end.
THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS
_By_ HENRY WADSWOHTH LONGFELLOW
It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.
Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds
That ope in the month of May.
The skipper he stood beside the helm
His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.
Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.
"Last night the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
Colder and colder blew the wind
A gale from the Northeast;
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.
[Illustration: He Bound Her To The Mast.]
Down came the storm, and smote amain,
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.
"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale,
That ever wind did blow."
He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
"O father! I hear the church-bells ring.
O say, what may it be?"
"'Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!"--
And he steered for the open sea.
"O father! I hear the sound of guns.
O say, what may it be?"
"Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"
"O father! I see a gleaming light.
O say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.
And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Towards the reef of Norman's Woe.
And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf,
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!
At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!
A DOG OF FLANDERS
[Footnote: This story has been abridged somewhat]
_By_ LOUISE DE LA RAMEE
Nello and Patrasche were left all alone in the world. They were friends
in a friendship closer than brotherhood.
Nello was a little Ardennois; Patrasche was a big Fleming. They were
both of the same age by length of years, yet one was still young and
the other already old. They had dwelt together almost all their days;
both were orphaned and destitute and owed their lives to the same hand.
Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little Flemish village, a
league from Antwerp.
It was the hut of an old man--a poor man--of old Jehan Daas, who in his
time had been a soldier and who remembered the wars that had trampled
the country as oxen tread down the furrows, and who had brought from
his service nothing except a wound which had made him a cripple.
When Jehan Daas had reached his full eighty his daughter had died in
the Ardennes, hard by Stavelot, and had left him in legacy her two-
year-old son. The old man could ill contrive to support himself, but he
took up the additional burden uncomplainingly, and it soon became
welcome and precious to him. Little Nello--which was but a pet
diminutive for Nicholas--throve with him, and the old man and the
little child lived in the poor little hut contentedly.
They were terribly poor--many a day they had nothing at all to eat.
They never by any chance had enough. To have had enough to eat would
have been to have reached paradise at once. But the old man was gentle
and good to the boy and the boy was a beautiful, innocent, truthful,
tender-hearted creature; and they were happy on a crust and a few
leaves of cabbage and asked no more of earth or heaven, save, indeed,
that Patrasche should be always with them, since without Patrasche
where would they have been?
Jehan Daas was old and crippled and Nello was but a child--and
Patrasche was their dog.
A dog of Flanders--yellow of hide, large of limb, with wolflike ears
that stood erect, and legs bowed and feet widened in the muscular
development wrought in his breed by the many generations of hard
service. Patrasche came of a race which had toiled hard and cruelly
from sire to son in Flanders many a century--slaves of slaves, dogs of
the people, beasts of the shafts and harness, creatures that lived
training their sinews in the gall of the cart, and died breaking their
hearts on the flints of the street.
Before he was fully grown he had known the bitter gall of the cart and
collar. Before he had entered his thirteenth month he had become the
property of a hardware dealer, who was accustomed to wander over the
land north and south, from the blue sea to the green mountains. They
sold him for a small price because he was so young.
This man was a drunkard and a brute. The life of Patrasche was a life
of abuse.
His purchaser was a sullen, ill-living, brutal Brabantois, who heaped
his cart full with pots and pans, and flagons and buckets, and other
wares of crockery and brass and tin, and left Patrasche to draw the
load as best he might while he himself lounged idly by the side in fat
and sluggish ease, smoking his black pipe and stopping at every wine
shop or café on the road.
One day, after two years of this long and deadly agony, Patrasche was
going on as usual along one of the straight, dusty, unlovely roads that
lead to the city of Rubens.
It was full midsummer and exceedingly warm. His cart was heavy, piled
high with goods in metal and earthenware. His owner sauntered on
without noticing him otherwise than by the crack of the whip as it
curled around his quivering loins.
The Brabantois had paused to drink beer himself at every wayside house,
but he had forbidden Patrasche to stop for a moment for a draft from
the canal. Going along thus, in the full sun, on a scorching highway,
having eaten nothing for twenty-four hours, and, which was far worse
for him, not having tasted water for nearly twelve; being blind with
dust, sore with blows, and stupefied with the merciless weight which
dragged upon his loins, Patrasche, for once, staggered and foamed a
little at the mouth and fell.
He fell in the middle of the white, dusty road, in the full glare of
the sun; he was sick unto death and motionless. His master gave him the
only medicine in his pharmacy--kicks and oaths and blows with the oak
cudgel--which had been often the only food and drink, the only wage and
reward, ever offered to him.
But Patrasche was beyond the reach of any torture or of any curses.
Patrasche lay, dead to all appearances, down in the white powder of the
summer dust. His master, with a parting kick, passed on and left him.
After a time, among the holiday makers, there came a little old man who
was bent, and lame, and feeble. He was in no guise for feasting. He was
poor and miserably clad, and he dragged his silent way slowly through
the dust among the pleasure seekers.
He looked at Patrasche, paused, wondered, turned aside, then kneeled
down in the rank grass and weeds of the ditch and surveyed the dog with
kindly eyes of pity.
There was with him a little, rosy, fair-haired, dark-eyed child of a
few years old, who pattered in amid the bushes, that were for him
breast high, and stood gazing with a pretty seriousness upon the poor,
great, quiet beast.
Thus it was that these two first met--the little Nello and the big
Patrasche. They carried Patrasche home; and when he recovered he was
harnessed to the cart that carried the milk cans of the neighbors to
Antwerp. Thus the dog earned the living of the old man and the boy who
saved him.
There was only one thing which caused Patrasche any uneasiness in his
life, and it was this: Antwerp, as all the world knows, is full at
every turn of old piles of stones, dark, and ancient, and majestic,
standing in crooked courts, jammed against gateways and taverns, rising
by the water's edge, with bells ringing above them in the air, and ever
and again out of their arched doors a swell of music pealing.
There they remain, the grand old sanctuaries of the past, shut in amid
the squalor, the hurry, the crowds, the unloveliness, and the commerce
of the modern world, and all day long the clouds drift, and the birds
circle, and the winds sigh around them, and beneath the earth at their
feet there sleeps--Rubens.
And the greatness of the mighty master still rests upon Antwerp.
Wherever we turn in its narrow streets his glory lies therein, so that
all mean things are thereby transfigured; and as we pace slowly through
the winding ways, and by the edge of the stagnant waters, and through
the noisome courts, his spirit abides with us, and the heroic beauty of
his visions is about us, and the stones that once felt his footsteps,
and bore his shadow, seem to rise and speak of him with living voices.
For the city which is the tomb of Rubens still lives to us through him,
and him alone.
Now, the trouble of Patrasche was this:
Into these great, sad piles of stones, that reared their melancholy
majesty above the crowded roofs, the child Nello would many and many a
time enter and disappear through their dark, arched portals, while
Patrasche, left upon the pavement, would wearily and vainly ponder on
what could be the charm which allured from him his inseparable and
beloved companion.
[Illustration: RESCUE OF PATRASCHE]
Once or twice he did essay to see for himself, clattering up the steps
with his milk cart behind him, but thereon he had been always sent back
again summarily by a tall custodian in black clothes and silver chains
of office, and, fearful of bringing his little master into trouble, he
desisted and crouched patiently before the church until such time as
the boy reappeared.
What was it? wondered Patrasche.
He thought it could not be good or natural for the lad to be so grave,
and in his dumb fashion he tried all he could to keep Nello by him in
the sunny fields or in the busy market places.
But to the church Nello would go. Most often of all he would go to the
great cathedral; and Patrasche, left without on the stones by the iron
fragments of the Quentin Matsys's gate, would stretch himself and yawn
and sigh, and even howl now and then, all in vain, until the doors
closed and the child perforce came forth again, and, winding his arms
about the dog's neck, would kiss him on his broad, tawny-colored
forehead and murmur always the same words:
"If I could only see them, Patrasche! If I could only see them!"
What were they? pondered Patrasche, looking up with large, wistful,
sympathetic eyes.
One day, when the custodian was out of the way and the doors left ajar,
he got in for a moment after his friend, and saw. "They" were two great
covered pictures on either side of the choir.
Nello was kneeling, wrapt as in an ecstasy, before the altar picture of
the "Assumption," and when he noticed Patrasche and rose and drew the
dog gently out into the air, his face was wet with tears, and he looked
up at the veiled places as he passed them and murmured to his
companion:
"It is so terrible not to see them, Patrasche, just because one is poor
and cannot pay! He never meant that the poor should not see them when
he painted them, I am sure. And they keep them shrouded there---
shrouded in the dark---the beautiful things! And they never feel the
light, and no eyes look upon them unless rich people come and pay. If I
could only see them I would be content to die."
But he could not see them, and Patrasche could not help him, for to
gain the silver piece that the church exacts for looking on the glories
of the "Elevation of the Cross" and the "Descent from the Cross" was a
thing as utterly beyond the powers of either of them as it would have
been to scale the heights of the cathedral spire.
The whole soul of the little Ardennois thrilled and stirred with an
absorbing passion for art.
Going on his way through the old city in the early daybreak before the
sun or the people had seen them, Nello, who looked only a little
peasant boy, with a great dog drawing milk to sell from door to door,
was in a heaven of dreams whereof Rubens was the god. Nello, cold and
hungry, with stockingless feet in wooden shoes, and the winter winds
blowing among his curls and lifting his poor, thin garments, was in
rapture of meditation wherein all that he saw was the beautiful face of
the Mary of "Assumption," with the waves of her golden hair lying upon
her shoulders and the light of an eternal sun shining down upon her
brow. Nello, reared in poverty, and buffeted by fortune, and untaught
in letters, and unheeded by men, had the compensation or the curse
which is called genius.
No one knew it--he as little as any. No one knew it.
"I should go to my grave quite content if I thought, Nello, that when
thou growest a man thou couldst own this hut and the little plat of
ground and labor for thyself and be called Baas by thy neighbors," said
the old man Jehan many an hour from his bed.
Nello dreamed of other things in the future than of tilling the little
rood of earth, and living under the wattle roof, and being called Baas
by neighbors, a little poorer or a little less poor than himself. The
cathedral spire, where it rose beyond the fields in the ruddy evening
skies or in the dim, gray, misty morning, said other things to him than
this. But these he told only to Patrasche, whispering, childlike, his
fancies in the dog's ear when they went together at their work through
the fogs of the daybreak or lay together at their rest amongst the
rustling rushes by the water's side.
There was only one other besides Patrasche to whom Nello could talk at
all of his daring fancies. This other was little Alois, who lived at
the old red mill on the grassy mound, and whose father, the miller, was
the best-to-do husbandman in all the village.
Little Alois was a pretty baby, with soft, round, rosy features, made
lovely by those sweet, dark eyes that the Spanish rule has left in so
many a Flemish face.
Little Alois often was with Nello and Patrasche. They played in the
fields, they ran in the snow, they gathered the daisies and bilberries,
they went up to the old gray church together, and they often sat
together by the broad wood fire in the millhouse.
One day her father, Baas Cogez, a good man, but stern, came on a pretty
group in the long meadow behind the mill.
It was his little daughter sitting amidst the hay, with the great,
tawny head of Patrasche on her lap, and many wreaths of poppies and
blue cornflowers round them both. On a clean, smooth slab of pine wood
the boy Nello drew their likeness with a stick of charcoal.
The miller stood and looked at the portrait with tears in his eyes, it
was so strangely like, and he loved his own child closely and well.
Then he roughly chid the little girl for idling there whilst her mother
needed her within, and sent her indoors crying and afraid. Then,
turning, he snatched the wood from Nello's hands.
[Illustration: NELLO AND PATRASCHE]
"Dost much of such folly?" he asked. But there a tremble in his voice.
Nello colored and hung his head. "I draw everything I see," he
murmured.
Baas Cogez went into his millhouse sore troubled in his mind. "This lad
must not be so much with Alois," he said to his wife that night.
"Trouble may come of it hereafter. He is fifteen now and she is twelve,
and the lad is comely." And from that day poor Nello was allowed in the
millhouse no more.
Nello had a secret which only Patrasche knew. There was a little
outhouse to the hut, which no one entered but himself--a dreary place
but with an abundant clear light from the north. Here he had fashioned
himself rudely an easel in rough lumber, and here, on the great sea of
stretched paper, he had given shape to one of the innumerable fancies
which possessed his brain.
No one ever had taught him anything; colors he had no means to buy; he
had gone without bread many a time to procure even the poor vehicles
that he had there; and it was only in black and white that he could
fashion the things he saw. This great figure which he had drawn here in
chalk was only an old man sitting on a fallen tree--only that. He had
seen old Michel, the woodman, sitting so at evening many a time.
He never had had a soul to tell him of outline or perspective, of
anatomy or of shadow, and yet he had given all the weary, worn-out age,
all the sad, quiet patience, all the rugged, careworn pathos of his
original, and given them so that the old, lonely figure was a poem,
sitting there, meditative and alone, on the dead tree, with the
darkness of descending night behind him.
It was rude, of course, in a way, and had many faults no doubt; and yet
it was real, true to nature, true to art, mournful, and, in a manner,
beautiful.
Patrasche had lain quiet countless hours watching its gradual creation
after the labor of each day was done, and he knew that Nello had a
hope--vain and wild perhaps, but strongly cherished--of sending this
great drawing to compete for a prize of 200 francs a year, which it was
announced in Antwerp would be open to every lad of talent, scholar or
peasant, under eighteen, who attempted to win it with unaided work of
chalk or pencil. Three of the foremost artists in the town of Rubens
were to be the judges and elect the victor according to his merits.
All the spring and summer and autumn Nello had been at work upon this
treasure, which, if triumphant, would build him his first steps toward
independence and the mysteries of the arts, which he blindly,
ignorantly and yet passionately adored.
The drawings were to go in on the 1st of December and the decision to
be given on the 24th, so that he who should win might rejoice with all
his people at the Christmas season.
In the twilight of a bitter winter day, and with a beating heart, now
quick with hope, now faint with fear, Nello placed the great picture on
his little green milk cart and left it, as enjoined, at the doors of a
public building.
He took heart as he went by the cathedral. The lordly form of Rubens
seemed to rise from the fog and darkness and to loom in its
magnificence before him, whilst the lips, with their kindly smile,
seemed to him to murmur, "Nay, have courage! It was not by a weak heart
and by faint fears that I wrote my name for all time upon Antwerp."
The winter was sharp already. That night, after they reached the hut,
snow fell, and it fell for many days after that, so that the paths and
the divisions of the fields were all obliterated, and all the smaller
streams were frozen over and the cold was intense upon the plains.
Then, indeed, it became hard work to go round for milk, while the world
was all dark, and carry it through the darkness to the silent town.
In the winter time all drew nearer to each other, all to all except to
Nello and Patrasche, with whom none now would have anything to do,
because the miller had frowned upon the child. Nello and Patrasche were
left to fare as they might with the old, paralyzed, bedridden man in
the little cabin, whose fire often was cold, and whose board often was
without bread, for there was a buyer from Antwerp who had taken to
drive his mule in of a day for the milk of the various dairies, and
there were only three or four of the people who had refused the terms
of purchase and remained faithful to the little green cart. So that the
burden which Patrasche drew had become light, and the centime pieces in
Nello's pouch had become, alas! light likewise.